


He Told Me That I Have a Soul

by eleonine



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Backstory, Bigotry & Prejudice, Character Development, Character Study, Gen, Genocide, Holocaust, Inspired by Novel, Redemption, References to Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-27
Updated: 2013-07-27
Packaged: 2017-12-21 11:47:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/899952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleonine/pseuds/eleonine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the liberation of Auschwitz, Erik is confused, brutalized, and dead-set on revenge against the man who made his life a living hell there. But then an act of unspeakable kindness transforms him forever, and with him the course of history.</p><p>Inspired by Victor Hugo’s <i>Les Misérables</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Told Me That I Have a Soul

**Author's Note:**

> This was complicated to write. _X-Men_ and _Les Misérables_ are not obviously compatible canons. Neither their casts nor their settings slot neatly over each other. Erik Lehnsherr isn’t Jean Valjean, and I’ve made no attempt to make him so. But there is something about Erik’s character and the world in which he lives that calls to the themes Victor Hugo conveyed, and I wanted to explore that connection. I hope the result carries across my immense respect for the source material, the sensitive topics I’ve covered, and the magnificent book from which I draw my inspiration. If anything here offends you or strikes you as inaccurate, don’t hesitate to let me know.
> 
> The title quote is from the English-language version of the musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alan Boublil, and Herbert Kretzmer.

He told me that I have a soul.

How does he know?

(“Valjean’s Soliloquy”)

**xx xx**

_January 1945; Oświęcim, Poland_  

In the end, Doktor Schmidt abandoned him.

Erik, alone most of the day in his concrete matchbox, stuck in a shell too dense for camp gossip to penetrate, had only what Schmidt told him to go on, and the good doctor didn’t see fit to mention how close the Red Army had gotten to Auschwitz. Schmidt never kept his pessimism about the war a secret, not from Erik, not in the intimacy of their sessions together: for months he’d been predicting a German loss. But as it actually drew to a close, he kept silent. Somehow he made it so it never occurred to Erik what the end would really mean.

He never thought it would make him free. It was beyond him to consider it. He trusted Schmidt to make sure he’d be a slave forever, and to protect him from a life without pain. To keep the world running in all good sense.

But one morning he came to Erik’s cell, and betrayed him. The heavy wooden door forced its way into the room, and the SS on the other side moved to let Schmidt inside. The fog of his presence instantly halved the space in the room, taking every inch that wasn’t squalor. He motioned for the grunt to close the door. Then he leaned one shoulder against it, and regarded Erik with some amusement. “Yes, you look very ill to me,” he said without preamble.

Erik, who was on his feet even before the key penetrated the lock, became immediately nervous. He couldn’t be confused that easily—confusion was too heavy for camp, too slow—so he was afraid. Fear was lighter, more tractable. But since he wasn’t allowed to speak without permission out of session, he just waited.

“I don’t think you’ll be able to evacuate with the others,” Schmidt continued. “I have some sad news for you, Erik. Today is our last day together. It’s all right, really. You’ll need some time by yourself if you want to—come into your own, if you like.” He smiled and shook a cigarette from his fine silver case, the one engraved _Wir sind die Zukunft_. We are the future. Erik couldn't move silver, so it was allowed in the cell. Schmidt smoked constantly, no matter the state of the tobacco rations; the burn scars proving it were scattered casually as pockmarks across Erik’s body.

“Obviously you’ll need to be alive if we want that to happen. I’m doing what I can to protect you. You don’t want to evacuate, trust me. Ivan’s almost here, and I’m sure he’ll be sympathetic.” He took stock of Erik’s silence, and found it unsatisfactory. “You can ask.”

“Evacuate, Herr Doktor?” Erik asked. His tone was mechanical, an automatic response to what was surely a command, but overlaid with real concern.

“Well, yes. The SS are very concerned about the Slavic horde discovering their little project. So they’re going to march anyone who can walk further west, into the heartland. That strikes me as a somewhat dangerous adventure, and one I’m sure you’d rather avoid, yes? So I’m arranging for you to stay here. I’ll have to go west myself, but you’ll be fine.”

At Erik’s expression, Schmidt tilted his head a fraction to the side, and heaved a smiling sigh. He stepped from the door and rested his hands on Erik’s too-thin shoulders. There wasn’t any stopping them from tensing, but it didn’t seem to offend him. “I know I’ve mistreated you in the past. But I want you to know I have nothing but warm feelings for you. This room—” He gestured with the still-unlit cigarette at the dirty concrete walls, at the straw-covered plank meant to be a bed, at the wooden bucket meant to be a toilet. “—our work together. All that was for your own good. You’ll understand when you’re older, I promise.”

He fished a folder of matches out of the interior pocket of his suit jacket, and lit the cigarette. After being absorbed in its excellence for a dozen seconds or so, and refreshing the acrid layer of smoke in the room, he seemed to remember something. “Oh,” he said, and reached once more into his jacket pocket. He lifted Erik’s hand, and pressed something into his palm: the coin that killed his mother.

He gave it to Erik on the first day, only to take it away as punishment for some stupidity or another. Now he lifted his eyebrows in an avuncular gesture, as though he’d just handed out a piece of candy, and his eyes took on a fond cast. “A keepsake. Until we meet again.” He called for the door to be opened and gave Erik a good-natured slap on the arm.

Then he disappeared, easy as that.

Erik couldn’t move, even to tremble. What could be happening? What was Schmidt doing? The Reichsmark burned in his fingers, illicit, ferocious. He felt as though he’d been shot in the head, and somehow was still awake, still trapped on his feet, waiting for death to scoop him out and let him crumple.

His heart pounded in his teeth, his breath, his knees. If he screamed like he wanted to—without ever stopping—someone actually would shoot him, so instead he opted for a strangled kind of silence. He forced himself to sit down. The coin remained hidden in his palm. He couldn’t look at it.

The thought arose, the most coherent available to him, that maybe someone _would_ come in to kill him. If Doktor Schmidt had really . . . Erik had no protection. Fear multiplied like bacteria in his gut, his chest, aching and spreading. He curled his head into the crooks of his arms and tried to brace himself against the onslaught of the empty room. The only way to find out what was happening was to wait, he told himself, and he knew how to do that. Most of his time in Schmidt’s possession had been spent waiting alone in this room.

This couldn’t be it, not after everything. This was a trick. He wouldn’t let the punch line catch him off guard. Just wait.

Eventually, an hour or twenty-four later, the door did swing open again. But there was no one on the other side. Not Doktor Schmidt, or one of the SS, or even a kapo, but only a fellow prisoner. Erik, once again on his feet, stared at him. The slave stared back from sunken eyes, and lifted a key to the height of the faded star on his chest. “I was told to let you out,” he said.

The words were thin and unsubstantial as their speaker, but Erik couldn’t manage to match them. His eyes fell to the key and locked there. The untouchable stone key, in the hands of this rot-toothed, sickly apparition. It was unthinkable.

The coin pulsed between Erik’s fingers and he got a vision of lodging it between the intruder’s eyes. His instincts, operating even the absence of his mind, fought the impulse off.

“Almost everyone’s gone,” the slave supplied.

“Schmidt?” Erik managed to say. “Doktor Schmidt is gone?”

The prisoner regarded him without expression, or with an expression beyond parsing. “Everyone’s gone.” He clutched the key in his bony hand, fingers not enough to stop it showing between them, and while Erik struggled with the complexity of breath, walked off with it.

With the cell door gaping obscenely in front of him, with the situation so unknown, he couldn’t remain nonfunctional for long. But it took his mind a few moments to remember this. If there were food in his belly he would’ve thrown it up, but instead all he did was teeter.

When he came back to himself he shook his head, locked away his incomprehension, and simply proceeded forward as he ought to have done immediately. He let the remainder of the general camp population absorb him, and then kept himself focused on survival through the sheer necessity of it.

Nine hungry days later, the Soviets marched into Oświęcim, and he was liberated.

But that is neither the end of the story, nor the beginning of it.

**xx**

What happened to Erik in Auschwitz is outside the power of language to describe. He, maybe, could summon the memory of it in later years, and recall some approximation of what he felt there and how it changed him, but he couldn’t translate it in its fullness into any external form if he were inspired to try. Even Charles Xavier, when they eventually met, had trouble understanding it, and he had the benefit of bypassing words entirely. It is only possible to give an idea, from which the imagination may fabricate what it likes.

He was thirteen when he arrived there. It was 1944, and the winter of 1943 was still clawing in the wind and rain like a panicked animal, scratching his face and biting his hands. He had been bar mitzvahed in the ghetto eleven months before, but he wasn’t a man. When they tried to take his mother, after they’d already taken his father and his siblings, he reacted as a child would.

He screamed.

He cried.

He bent the gate.

The metal was like a limb that had fallen asleep and was now filling with pins and needles, and returning to life. Moving it wasn’t easy or painless, but he did it reflexively, because she was on the other side. He didn’t think he could live without her. He didn’t think he would.

Then Doktor Schmidt shot her. He shot her, and for just a moment, the gears of the Earth caught and the ground shook. Erik knew this happened because he felt it. The force of the quake took him over, and when it passed two men’s skulls had been crushed, his mother was a corpse, and Erik was living in a new world.

The old world, where all of this had been impossible, retreated in his mind as the world of fairytales once had done. His early childhood, the days of school and Sabbath candles and dreams of the future, which he had treasured for so long as his definition of normalcy, as a place to which he’d truly believed he might someday return, began to seem a vicious lie. A story invented by parents to lull their children into the vulnerability of sleep.

Life, real life, was measured in how much food he could get his hands on. In figuring out how to avoid Schmidt’s worst implements. In how hot he could get his hate to burn in comparison with the pain and the hunger and the cold.

Carefully he kept that hatred from ever turning into defiance, into something that could hurt him, because then he’d have to let it go. It was all he had. With it he could fuel the strange power Schmidt was so obsessed with, yes, but more importantly, it gave him something real to hang onto. A feeling not stripped down to the base compulsions of survival. It kept him from losing all of himself.

Otherwise, his existence contracted on itself until there was nothing in it Schmidt hadn’t placed there. Even his body was remade to new specifications. His skin became elaborated with scars while he wasted away beneath it, and his ribs, joints, and cheekbones rose out of him like the topography of a draining sea. He learned to hold himself a certain way, so that what height he was able to gain never seemed to add to the space he occupied. He taught himself to live in the absence of the energy to do so.

But it wasn’t his body Schmidt was after. He wanted Erik’s mind. Within this simple, mysterious, grotesque ability to move metal, he said, the most fundamental forces of the universe were at play. The possibilities were endless, limited only by their will.

It wasn’t good enough, then, to lock Erik up. Torture and physical misery could teach him where to find this power, could twist it against the thread of his survival instinct until the two were inextricable, but they couldn’t by themselves make him into what Schmidt wanted him to be.

So he developed a curriculum for Erik. He took him outside the lab building to see what was happening. Erik was made to follow along as they observed whatever horrors Schmidt thought sufficiently educational. Once, he selected three prisoners at random—women, workers in the Buna factory—and had them shot, for no better reason than that Erik was watching.

It was torture, but of a more specific kind than what he endured in the lab. It turned his empathy against itself, and was meant to destroy it through overuse. Not that he was a giftedly kind boy, or that, at that age, he had any kind of real moral awareness at all, but there are things it is impossible for a normal person to see without suffering—at least until they’ve seen enough of them. It was all in accordance with the policy of _Vernichtung durch Arbeit_ : extermination through labor.

In every other sense he was kept away from the other inmates. His uniform bore no markings to indicate whether he was a Jew or a Gypsy or a Pole. And although he allowed it by others, Schmidt never called him filthy, or vermin, or insulted him in any way. In fact, he never said anything to so much as acknowledge the fundamental fact of Erik’s Jewishness, except as a sort of in-joke.

Perhaps it was his goal to sever the old bonds of identity which held Erik together, and shatter him into easily rearrangeable pieces. If that was the case, it didn’t quite work. He had been successfully transplanted into a new reality, but he himself still contained materials of the old one.

Still living inside him was the day it became illegal for his father to own the watch shop which had sustained their family since before Erik was born. The flight east which led them only to the gates of the ghetto, and the gradual acclimation to misery they all made there. Their hurried escape, the months in hiding, their final discovery. The cattle car. These things remained with him, leaving him to carry a weight Schmidt could not relieve him of. They reminded him, “You are a Jew, and this is what that means.”

So now he had more food than his fellow Jews. Now he didn’t have to worry quite as much about the gas chambers as those working and starving outside Schmidt’s domain. Now they could even be shot for his benefit. But none of this stopped him feeling Jewish. Instead he felt like a collaborator.

When Schmidt told him, at all the worst moments, how special, how much more evolved he was than even the perfect blond Aryans, part of him couldn’t help but believe it. But it was also impossible to rid himself of a perpetual feeling of taint. Of complicity. If, when all this was over, he was the last Jew left in the world, would it not be because he let himself survive? Because he let himself pretend to be something more than a Jew, for fear of being treated like one?

The future disappeared, the past reduced to mist, and what solidified in their place was hate. His only abstract thought became, “I will kill him.” He didn’t believe in God. He didn’t believe in freedom. The only old fable which had not been disproven was Death, implacable and alive in all things, the sole power he had seen in Auschwitz greater than Schmidt. He prayed to it, because it alone was worth praying to. Even though he didn’t expect it to give him what he wanted, he offered himself up to it as its agent. “I will kill him. Something must. Even Germans die. Please, let me be the one.”

Then the war ended, and once again the Earth caught on its own machinery. The gas chambers and crematoria, Death’s own monuments, burned. Schmidt disappeared into the ether. And Erik was left with a new kind of nothing.

The Soviets offered glimpses of the familiar logic. They weren’t wonderful. They gave out food and bandages and even hugs, but the world they came from was clearly not much kinder than the one they’d happened upon. Beneath their good purpose they were exhausted and brutal. Their sympathy, such as it was, did not extend to shock at the neat piles of corpses or at the living skeletons milling around. They raped some of the women, and, only for the crime of being captured, killed some of their own whom they found in the camp.

Despite these things, it became apparent that what kept Erik alive in Auschwitz would drive him insane outside it. All he could keep safely was the old prayer, which suddenly seemed answerable.

“I will kill him.”

I will kill him, so I have a reason to live.

**xx**

He hadn’t seen his father die, nor his sisters, nor his brother, so for a little while he could hope they were alive. This wasn’t simple. Under a microscope, the feeling was barely hope at all, but rather was mostly fear and all the atoms into which fear decays. He would have to tell them about Mama, and they would see it on his face that he was the cause of her death, and then they would see what Schmidt had made of him. They would hate him if he found them, he thought—or worse, he would hate them. But the hope was there, irresistible. His last dream of something other than killing.

They had been with him in Schmidt’s lab, right alongside his mother. He hadn’t abandoned them. He’d thought of them. Missed them. Nevertheless, during that year an ashy sediment had accumulated over their memories, obscuring details and transmuting them into a brittler form. What remained above the surface were half-buried, rocky jags. He still loved them to the extent that he could still love anyone, but he no longer knew them, even as they’d been before.

After Liberation, when he was trying to recall their faces in exact detail, this was what he found:

His father had delicate, steady hands, and his beard, when Erik kissed the cheek beneath it, smelled of tobacco smoke and hard work. A star-shaped scar marred his eyebrow where he was hurt fighting for Germany in the first war. When he came out of his workshop at the end of each day, Erik’s mother would run the tip of her finger over this scar and down his temple, and say, “Jakob, Jakob. Go see your children,” and he would obey her.

His older sister Gitta was sharp-eyed and rosy-cheeked. In the house in Düsseldorf, when Erik was sick, she sat at the foot of his bed and taught him to play chess. In the ghetto in Poland, when she herself was ill, Erik sat next to her and read from their much-diminished collection of books, allowing her to help him through the complicated words.

Immanuel, the brother, had big, solemn blue eyes of a more romantic shade than Erik’s own. He was lazier than a rug about anything important, taller than Erik despite being two years younger, and loved to pick fights. From the moment they saw each other as babies they’d disliked each other, but it was the kind of dislike that, rather than pushing them apart, binds people together for life.

Baby Sonja had the heavy brown hair and eyes their mother failed to pass on to anyone else. Born at the worst possible time, five months before the November pogrom which forced her family to flee the country in which she was born, she smiled rarely and didn't look at things. No one knew how much she understood about what was being done to her life, and they couldn't bear to find out.

Erik wanted them all. If there was not enough love left in the world for them to love each other, then he wanted the hate. To see the spark of recognition in their eyes would be enough. But they were all dead.

Gitta was sick already. Even if she’d survived the train ride, even if she was deemed fit to work, she couldn’t have gone on much longer. Sonja was simply too young. Immanuel, maybe, who looked so much older than he was, might have survived, but not on his own, and their father—well. Asking after him confirmed that he was selected to be gassed after only a month.

Cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, schoolmates, people he’d passed on the street: all dead. He didn’t look anyone else up. Death, he knew, owned them all by default.

Life was something that occurred only on the fringes of death, and was more the more gruesome phenomenon.

Erik wasn’t the last Jew as he’d feared, only the last Lehnsherr. He didn’t cry. The ingredients for tears had already been harvested from him. Instead he gathered up his burdens, and moved on. His fantasy of killing Schmidt, as insubstantial as a dream of flying when it was birthed, became an obsession.

But it wasn’t so easy to become an assassin. He was only fourteen, almost fifteen. When Auschwitz was liberated, its former denizens were simply turned loose. No one offered an itinerary, help, resources, or indeed any material with which those penniless freed slaves might have created new lives. It would be months before the Allies had the infrastructure to even help them keep themselves alive. The initial legion of “displaced persons” was released into chaos. If Erik had been older, stronger, he thought he might have been able to take advantage of it, but as it was, he didn’t know how.

He was a survivor, but the system in which he knew how to survive was defunct. He was clever, but he had no knowledge his cleverness could make use of. His tongue was lead. The vagaries of making things happen rather than merely weathering them eluded him.

So he dithered, appallingly, and ended up in a Polish orphanage.

It was the kind of thing that could happen in those days, inexplicable even as it occurred. He found himself engulfed in a cold, exhausted city of perhaps twenty thousand souls, in a drab, cramped house overseen by a middle aged widow, her spinster daughter, and her war veteran son, who was missing three fingers on his right hand. They were kinder people than they appeared—not that Erik noticed.

How did he get there? Well, he walked. At one point he spent an hour jostling cordwood in the back of a covered truck. Apart from that, he didn’t really know.

Yet there he was. And for all that he still had to put up with the standard bile from his fellow orphans—for all that he was alone in the world—for all that his fondest and only hope was to hunt down and murder Dr. Klaus Schmidt—that moldy old house was the best place he could’ve been. It anchored him in the country and kept him safe from the worst that was out there. How it did this in that hungry time was, again, not something he was privy to.

There was only one other Jew in the orphanage, a Polish girl his age who wore long sleeves over her serial number and covered her head like an old married woman while her hair grew back. Unlike Erik, she was mostly ignored. This was because she was as quiet as a hole in the wall. If someone decided to go after her she would just look at them, too full of cruelty to hold any more, and the taunt would slosh, unabsorbed, to the ground. Their matron and her children discouraged these attacks, but even when they weren’t around, the girl was simply too ghastly to be an appealing target.

One day her uncle, a rich man who left the country even before the Warsaw bombings, tracked her down and took her to Canada. After that, perhaps she learned to speak again.

Erik wasn’t quiet. In fact, he could barely manage polite. In order to go on living he needed some kind of fuel to burn, and there was none as reliable as anger. Even the slightest thing could be poured into the tank and combusted, but since no one else knew or cared how necessary this was to his survival, he developed a reputation for being touchy and unreasonable.

“That _żyd_ ,” one boy said after a violent outburst nearly got Erik booted out into the street. “Why do they always have to be so hysterical? Why do we have to live with him?” The matron’s daughter overheard him and sent him to bed without supper, but since Erik himself was locked in a closet, equally empty-mouthed, he didn’t see this as much of a sign of solidarity.

He discovered, in time, that it was better to ferment than explode. By forcing it beneath the surface and letting it age under pressure, the power it yielded magnified sevenfold. This was an amazing feat for a boy his age, one which saved his life.

He failed to become a Communist. He learned to fight. He picked up Polish and taught himself Russian, then a smattering of both French and English, amazing his teachers and caretakers with what they called a gift for language. This bothered him; he thought it was another sign of his abnormality. He still didn’t know what he was, only that Schmidt had been excited by it, a sign he took as ominous.

If anyone else found out about _it_ , they would try to kill him, or worse. He was certain of that. The best he could hope for was that they would fail. But it never occurred to him to give it up, to let it wither in the back of his brain. The constant hum of metal, in tin cups, in pipes, in light bulb chains, reassured him. He told himself that no one could really hurt him, because he was something more than the others, something they couldn’t even fathom.

At night, he snuck outside to practice, evading nightmares as well as spying eyes. All he could safely work with were small, inconspicuous objects, like Schmidt’s coin. He reshaped a filched spoon into a makeshift knife and tried to learn to fling it exactly where he wanted it to go. When he became successful, he took to carrying it with him always, in one of his shoes. In the other he kept the Reichsmark.

Every night, he repeated his prayer.

He meant to leave as soon as he got his strength back. The years he spent in the orphanage were sources of shame for him, as though it were a character defect to be young. His mother came to him in his dreams, pulling him back to the seconds before her death. She screamed at him for being so slow to avenge her, then died, as she always did.

She was no longer quite real to him. An object took the place in his heart where she should have been—an automaton of consciousness. Her memory embodied for him an absolute good, and naturally this internal simulacrum took on his own developing morality. He hated himself for staying in Poland rather than hunting down her killer, so in his mind, she hated him, too.

He didn’t pay much attention to what was happening in the wider world. He couldn’t. There wasn’t enough of him to spare.

Finally they kicked him out so they wouldn’t have to feed him anymore. He packed his bags and didn’t have time to steal food for the road, as had been his plan. He was seventeen, and had been in the orphanage longer than in the camp. It wasn’t possible.

**xx**

_August 1950; Tallinn, Estonia_

For two more years Erik remained in Soviet-controlled territory. He picked up Schmidt’s trail sooner than expected when he met another survivor, a woman who had worked as a maid in Schmidt’s house, and who knew something of the man’s habits and connections. But instead of taking him west, as he expected, the information led him east. First to Latvia, then to Estonia. It was from there he finally found his way out.

By then he had acquired some of the skills necessary for life in his chosen career. He learned the art of making useful acquaintances. Through dangerous trial and error, he figured out how to get where and do what he needed to without being noticed by the authorities, and, to better cajole, intimidate, or ingratiate, as he often needed to do, he developed the rough beginnings of eloquence and charisma in all three of his fluent languages. He discovered how to come by valuable things (money could work but goods were often better) and use them to smooth his way. In none of these finicky crafts could he be said to be a master, but he got by on wanting it badly enough.

Somehow, despite his early malnourishment, he grew tall and strong and broad-shouldered, and as he did so he could see the ghosts of his father and brother haunting his features. Perversely, the youth hadn’t yet left his face, and he knew he was something close to handsome. The uses of all these things gradually became apparent to him.

 By a natural process of maturation, he also began to think. He thought where before he merely brooded, and it was like discovering music. Now he churned ideas as well as emotions. An ideology, as yet half-baked, started to form where these ideas stuck together. He was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Everyone knows about teenage intellectuals. His case was rather severe.

He had three languages in which to read, and he used them, expanding them in the process. If a book was banned and he could find it, he read it on principle. In this way he became literate; in time that literacy would become culture.

But he didn’t stop his pursuit of Schmidt. In Tallinn, Estonia’s capital city, the train of evidence hopped tracks over the Gulf of Finland, and Erik knew he needed to follow it.

In Finland was a man named Alois Bischof. Bischof, though he wasn’t officially a war criminal, was nonetheless not a nice person, and was reputed to keep correspondence with Klaus Schmidt. Erik very much wanted to introduce himself.

It was around that time he met Paavo Vesik.

Vesik was a short, fearless, well-connected Estonian man, who could only be discovered by poking around long enough in Tallinn’s underworld. His habits were basically criminal, so that he seemed to Erik a capitalist pig stuck in a Communist sty. Encroaching baldness shone beneath his lingering wisps of brown hair and under that he had the broken face of an untalented boxer, but he held himself with all the confidence of attractiveness.

“I can get you to Helsinki,” he told Erik when enough had changed hands. Thankfully he spoke Russian well enough to compensate for Erik’s bad Estonian. “It’s only a boat ride away.” A consummate businessman, he never questioned Erik’s age or motives, only gave him knowledgeable, scrutinizing looks, and otherwise behaved as if nothing very delicate was going on. Erik liked that. This deal took a long time and a lot of work on Erik’s part to settle, and now they were on the verge of friendship. That got him further than the money.

They were in Vesik’s “office,” which was a basement in a seedy part of town. It smelled of damp, darkness, and rat urine in equal measures.

“How do you expect me to board this boat? The docks are thoroughly inspected.”

Vesik shook his head. “Docks. Bah. Who said anything about docks? No, we’ll take you out of town, to one of the villages, then drive you up the coast. A small boat can ferry you out to a bigger one, and then you’re off. After that, you go where you want.”

“And papers?”

“I’ll get you some of those, too.”

It was impressive work, to Erik’s eye. He told him so.

He didn’t speak Finnish, so rather than trying to pass himself off as Scandinavian, he would become a visitor from West Germany. The name on the passport was Lukas Weiss. The picture was his picture, taken by Vesik with a flashbulb camera and a sheet hung on the wall, then sent out to Vesik’s forger contact.

They got out of the city easily enough once the arrangements were made, then waited for a night in a nearby village. Vesik’s sister, precisely as ugly as her brother but also as shifty, lived there with her husband, and gave them a reason for their visit. The next day they went on their way.

They drove out of town in the late afternoon, took an odd turn so they ended up heading east and away from Tallinn, then traveled until nightfall to reach the rendezvous spot.

The boat wasn’t there.

“I think we’re a little early,” said Vesik, apparently unconcerned. “And they might still be a little late. It’s not time to worry just yet. Would you like something to eat?”

He set a paper bag filled with cloudberries on the hood of the car and they stood around it. There was just enough light left to see. Erik scooped out a handful, and threw them back between his molars. After four years, he still appreciated the security of food in his mouth, enough so that it allowed some small part of him relax, despite the circumstances. Everything was going well, for once. Berry juice set tart sparks flashing across his tongue. For a rare minute, he was content, and they ate in companionable silence in the wind coming off the gulf.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Vesik said, and walked around Erik to yank open the car door. Erik, of course, was alert to the movement. His metal sense had never stopped prowling, keeping lookout for approaching cars and the like. But he was calm, and in a good mood. Even his mistrust had limits. And in the obscurity of night, with his unhampered extra sense and secret power to protect him, he didn’t think to be afraid.

There was some small amount of metal in whatever Vesik was fiddling with, but nothing like a weapon, so Erik let his attention drift. Then a sharp pain lanced through his neck, tinged with metal—a needle. With it came an immediate, instinctual shot of the old rage. He whipped around to face Vesik, but the movement made him woozy. He teetered on his feet. “What—”

“Erik Lehnsherr,” said Vesik. Erik hadn’t given him his real name. Perhaps he only said it for the surprise effect, because then he socked Erik right in the face, too quickly for a good reaction. The combined force of the blow and the drug sent him folding to the ground. He felt a sharp edge press against his neck as Vesik leaned over him. Not metal. Porcelain, maybe, or sharpened stone. “Dumbass kid,” Vesik muttered. “Don’t move, or I’ll slit your throat. Just go to sleep.”

Erik felt as though his head had come unscrewed, and bits of him were leaking out. He managed to sink his awareness into the knife strapped to his leg and slid it from its sheath, but he couldn’t concentrate well enough to attack with it. “What’re you . . .”

The words slurred. His mouth was dry. Between frustration, anger, and fear, he wanted very much to scream. Or better, lash out. But all he could do was fumble with the knife.

Vesik heard the movement, and used his free hand to bash Erik’s nose in. The pain reached him only distantly. His metal sense flailed where his hands couldn’t, and managed to catch in the blade once again. He gathered all his remaining concentration into that one point, and flung it. That he hit Vesik, let alone at such velocity and in such an ideal place, was more a happy accident than anything else.

He felt warm blood on his face, and heard Vesik made a wet sort of sound. After that he didn’t know what happened, because he himself stopped happening.

But, as he’d discover upon waking, Vesik was dead.

**xx**

What had been the point of that? Erik wouldn’t find out until later, but a boat _had_ been bound for that small stretch of Estonian coastline, sponsored by Alois Bischof himself. Bischof, indeed a close correspondent of Doktor Schmidt, happened to be aware of the telekinetic Jew who’d created such a stir among the Nazi higher-ups during the war. So when he heard that Erik Lehnsherr was after him, no doubt looking for a way to Schmidt, he had an idea.

The war was over, but the market for weapons was only expanding. The Americans, the Russians—undoubtedly such an oddity could be sold to someone. Bischof was a rich man. He’d been a rich man in Berlin during the rise of National Socialism, and through his own sharp enterprise had remained so after its fall. He saw money where others saw nothing but fear.

So he arranged it. Paavo Vesik, a much more dangerous man than Erik was led to believe, was contacted and offered a substantial sum of money. A plan was then concocted and set into motion which might contain this unusual beast. The elaborate setup grew out of three concurrent needs: to keep Erik in place long enough for Bischof to find a buyer, to lure him out to an isolated spot, and to give him as little reason as possible to use his “ability” until the last minute.

But unusually for Bischof, things fell through. The interest he received turned to smoke—no one believed him. How could he prove it? The Nazis were known occultists, their imaginations famously vivid. And, anyway, the more he thought about it, the more he wasn’t sure he believed the story himself. Schmidt was a respectable man, whose work Bischof had relied on more than once, but he was also something of a freak. And if not a freak, certainly a glory hound.

With the same abruptness with which he began the endeavor, he abandoned it as pointless. The boat never left its harbor. Vesik wasn’t informed of any of this. Bischof didn’t see the point. If Erik lived, it remained possible that he could be useful. The worst that could happen was Vesik would exterminate the troublesome rat, and the whole problem would be solved.

Of course that didn’t happen. Erik woke up next to a corpse, alone in the middle of nowhere, with a car he didn’t know how to drive, having killed a man. The early sunlight and the wind dug into his brain like barbed wire. It hurt his eyes just to open them. His clothes were covered in blood and sandy dirt, and he ached from the hardness of the ground. His broken nose pulsed angrily.

When he got his eyes to focus, they focused on Vesik.

Vesik wasn’t the first person Erik had killed. After all, he could still feel the skulls of those SS men collapsing under their helmets, still dreamed of it with varying degrees of horror and pleasure. But this was the first time since he began calling himself an adult, and, more importantly, the first time he’d done it deliberately. What happened when he was thirteen was a convulsion more than an attack. But this time . . . Even drugged he’d done nothing but what he meant to do.

For a whole minute he stared at the body, which since the night before had turned the familiar color and shade of death. It wasn’t even especially mangled, but was somehow so much worse than anything he’d seen previously, save perhaps his mother. The question that had troubled him since he was a child came back to him in full force: what was he?

What clue did this offer him?

Something horrible welled up within him. He climbed to his feet, using the car as leverage. His eyes slid closed, just for a moment, and without knowing what he was doing, he cut that something off. All the worst of the devils which lived inside him reared up and attacked it with such power that it was driven back. They knew better than to let it reach him.

He spared another look for Vesik and thought, this is what I’ll do to Schmidt. His metal sense slid down his leg until it found the Reichsmark, still hidden in his shoe, so familiar he could probably pick it out of a dragon’s den full of identical copies. The knife, which Vesik must’ve pulled from his throat as he was dying, lay a foot from the body. Erik left it where it was.

He started walking. In due time he found his way to Finland.

**xx**

_March 1951; Oulu Province, Finland_

Calling upon the memory of his Finnish maternal grandfather, Bischof traded in his Nazi past for a large country house a reasonable distance from the city of Oulu, in a town not too far from the one in which he’d spent countless childhood summers. A country he loved, a bank vault full of money, anonymity: save people to share them with, he had all the amenities of life. The locals knew him to be a largely unobtrusive widower whose only regular visitor was his son, Franz, a former officer of the Kriegsmarine, who came up from Köln four times a year.

In other words, he was still owed his share of unhappiness.

As stated earlier, Erik was still an amateur kind of vigilante; the art of espionage was one on which he was still finding his grip. Even so, he didn’t find it difficult to get the information he needed. Apart from the information he’d pieced together getting there, he spent a week putting his brand new, clumsy Finnish to work poking for gossip in the town where Bischof lived.

“I’m going to Oulu,” he explained in less than perfect grammar to a man, a farmer by his dress, at a local tavern. After so much time sneaking around in Soviet countries, where everyone’s eyes peered over everyone else’s shoulders, he found the friendliness of these people disconcerting. Who was he, after all? A foreign kid who’d paid for a week at the inn with winter not yet gone and no relatives in town. He should be immediately suspect. Instead they found him fascinating. He continued, “My uncle lives there. But I thought I’d rest here for a while. I’m in no hurry.” Or at least that was the point he got across.

“Where are you from?” said the man, slowing and exaggerating each syllable, as though teaching a baby to talk.

“Vienna.” Erik doubted the man could tell an Austrian accent from a German one, especially one as mangled as his, and he wanted to conceal himself as much as possible. He took a sip of his beer. He’d taken up drinking all the way back in Poland and found it an enjoyable habit, but at twenty he already knew the value of self-control. “This is a nice town. Who lives in that big house on the hill? Must be a rich guy.”

“Oh, that’s Herra Bischof. My daughter works for him.”

And so on. It didn’t take many conversations of this type to get the lay of the land. For servants, Bischof had two maids and a cook, all three of whom walked to work from their homes in town. There was a bodyguard, Jani, who lived in the house, and apparently Bischof’s son was visiting that week.

The last thing in particular was hard to miss. Even making sure to talk to as small a number of people on as large a range of subjects as possible, he more than once heard praises sung of Franz Bischof, who many counted as a personal friend. Evidently he quite enjoyed his occasional vacation spot, and took it upon himself to know its inhabitants by name.

Since all Erik cared to know about the man was that he was a Nazi naval officer and the son of a Nazi businessman, he took little notice of this, except inasmuch as it told him there was an extra man in the house he planned to attack. Since Vesik, he’d not had reason to kill anyone else, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t prepared to do so. He’d kill Bischof, and Franz, too, if it became necessary. He investigated them for a week without any kind of sympathy, then moved in.

 **xx**  

The house was at least several hundred years old, and elegant even with what must otherwise have been quite a stately garden still bare for the winter. There were many round-topped, small-paned windows peering dully from the façade like insect eyes, and five chimneys stuck from the top like antennae. Like many rich things, it gave the simultaneous impression of delicacy and sturdiness.

Erik, as a rule, had no appreciation for such places. His father had been an artisan. He’d lived a small life but a clean one, had given them food and warmth and an education, and kept them safe for as long as he could. Then he, and they with him, were stripped of all class and right to be in the world, and returned to the dust even in advance of death. Erik himself was a vagrant. These houses represented only another vantage point from which people could look down on him. They were the high ground—tactical, social, moral—from which he’d always been barred.

Well, he was happy to make the climb tonight. Bischof was making it easy. If he’d beefed up his security at all after the incident seven months ago, he’d let it go lax since. Perhaps he wasn’t the sort of man who enjoyed living surrounded by bodyguards. Perhaps he simply wasn’t worried. Either way, it was a mistake. Erik came at the building from behind, in dark clothes, all six senses hyper-alert. He had knives, some rope, a flashlight. With his ability, lock picks and crowbars were redundant, and blade worked just as well as a bullet.

Such a large house, with so few inhabitants and all or most of those in their beds, with the door opening as easily as with a key—it wasn’t difficult to get in without being noticed. There was no way of learning the layout ahead of time, so when he slipped in the back door, into a dark hallway, he had to make some educated guesses. He’d spoken to the cook, who’d mentioned the east wing was closed due to the cost of its upkeep. That narrowed his search considerably.

He crept along, flashlight in hand, knife at the ready, moving as quickly as he could without making a noise. He listened briefly at each closed door and at every turn before going on. This part of the house was for the servants, he thought. When he found a staircase, he climbed it.

As far as he knew, there were only three people he might meet: Bischof, Franz, and the bodyguard Jani. Erik was afraid of none of them. He was afraid of very little, after Vesik. If he encountered Jani or Franz before he found Bischof, and they caused him trouble, he would kill them. If he found Bischof, he would find some way of keeping him quiet, and then interrogate him. They were far enough from town that he didn’t have to worry about anyone there intervening.

The staircase took him to a small room which opened into another hallway. This one was more luxurious, with a carpeted floor, patterned wallpaper, and unlit sconces sleeping beside every other door. Carefully, carefully he went to each door in turn and listened and felt, straining his metal sense for a compressing bedspring. Finally, another floor up, at the third door from the end of a corridor, he found what he was looking for.

He switched off the flashlight, and called a knife from its sheath on his belt into his hand. He gripped it tight and steeled himself.

The door wasn’t locked, so he opened it gently, taking control of the hinges so they wouldn’t squeak. The figure in the bed maintained its slow, shallow breath. Erik closed the door behind him, and walked soundlessly to the bed. He pressed his hand hard to the man’s mouth; when even this failed to rouse him, Erik shook him.

In the dark, he couldn’t see the eyes shoot open, but he felt the body tense and begin to struggle. “Don’t move,” he said softly in German, and the man stilled. “I have a knife.” He swept his sixth sense over the walls, found the light switch, and flipped it.

The man, only maybe forty, wasn’t Bischof. Erik sighed, irritated. “Are you Franz Bischof?”

The man nodded. Erik could see his eyes now; they were bright, frightened. His irritation flared into anger. The question, “How did you do that?” was there on Franz’s face.

“Well, Franz, I have no reason not to kill you. Do you know that? If you can tell me what room your father sleeps in—if you can prove you’re worth more to me alive than dead—maybe I won’t. What do you think?”

Franz looked at him, his expression calmer than before, his body more relaxed against the mattress. He nodded.

“If I take my hand away, are you going to scream?”

Franz shook his head.

“If you do anything to give me up, I will kill you, and everyone else here. All right?” He gave Franz a long look, just to emphasize his point. Then, slowly, he moved his hand.

Franz blinked, rubbed his lips together. Said in an undertone, “Are you Erik Lehnsherr?”

Erik stared at him. “What?”

Franz propped himself up on one elbow. “My father knew you were coming. He wants to sell you to the Russians, or kill you.”

For a second, Erik’s whole machine failed to operate. He had no idea what the man in the bed was saying. “I have a knife,” he said again, the threat seeping into his voice. “Tell me where Bischof is. Don’t try to stall.”

“You need to leave,” Franz said patiently. “You might have tripped an invisible alarm. He’s planned all of this, and you need to leave.”

Erik unfroze himself. He let go of the knife with his hand and it pressed forward on Franz’s jugular. “Why are you telling me this?” he growled.

“What does that matter? You need to go.” Now somehow the calmness was complete. Erik stared at him for a moment before belief trickled in. Just as it did, he heard something outside the door, and he whirled around just in time for it to be broken in.

He felt a metal-tipped dart push through the air towards him, and he redirected it even as he pulled the knife away from Franz’s neck and threw it at the invaders. Three of them, big, professional-looking. He batted another dart out of the air and a tranquilizer gun from the hands of one of the shooter, before yet another dart landed. The drugs reached him as his knife sank into someone’s shoulder.

He called for it, and it returned to his hand. He barreled toward the men, aware his time was running out, tackled the one with the shoulder wound, and stabbed another in the leg. He wasn’t dealing fatal blows, he thought dimly. He’d stabbed two of the three, but not so well as to stop them, and he was fading.

No.

Another dart hit. The knife flew at the third man and lodged in his stomach; Erik couldn’t sink into it far enough to get back his hold. He wobbled, and threw a punch which connected well enough, then staggered out into the hallway. Bischof’s guards were behind him, screaming obscenities in Finnish, clutching their wounds. The one who kept the knife wasn’t among them.

They caught him easily. One punched him in the solar plexus and he doubled over, unable to breathe. He pushed his whole body weight forward, the only move he had enough motor control left to perform, and managed to slam his knee into the guard’s leg wound as they fell, eliciting a cry of pain. The one with the shoulder wound kicked him in the side.

Erik was gasping, choking, barely able to move, thoughts a blur. They wanted him to die, he imagined. Well, they weren’t the first. He wouldn’t. Not for them. Somehow he got to his feet and slammed against the remaining guard. He managed to hit this one in the wound as well.

Then Franz was there. He said something in fast Finnish to the men, and Erik thought, well, I’ll fight you, too. Franz approached, and Erik lifted unsteady hands in something resembling a boxing stance. Franz didn’t stop, so Erik slurred some kind of threat. Franz reached out. Erik wobbled and fell forward a few inches, just in time to be caught by open palms.

“Come on,” said Franz quietly. “Let me help you.”

Erik, whose knees were on the point of buckling and whose thoughts barely deserved the name, allowed Franz to take on his weight and walk him forward, away from the injured men. His free will had been drained from him. When they were out of earshot Franz whispered, “They think I’m taking you to my father,” but Erik didn’t understand.

It was impossible to say how long they walked. Franz somehow kept him awake until they reached the town, ten minutes away at a normal pace. How it was that they remained unmolested, Erik didn’t know. Confusion, the old killer, had settled on him like snow. His memory stopped recording for most of the duration of the trip, so that he didn’t remember where he was brought, only waking up there.

But what happened after that, he’d never be able to forget.

 **xx**  

Again he woke with a splitting headache, but this time there was no dead body to contend with. There was something much scarier: he didn’t know what was going on. He sat up immediately. His head pounded at him in retaliation and splotches of night bloomed in his eyes. Without needing to think about it he took in what was in front of him.

The room was made of concrete, with a wooden ceiling, and no windows. There didn’t seem to be a door, either. A bare light bulb glowed rudely where it was attached to the wall. He remembered, without knowing where the memory came from, what Franz said about Bischof selling him to the Russians.

For a moment he was flooded through with one thought: not again, not again, not again. His first instinct was to crack his hands open against whatever wall was closest. He’d kill himself, he thought—no, he’d kill all of them, he wasn’t a child anymore, he _wouldn’t_ do this again.

Then he calmed enough to see more of his surroundings. In one corner was a shelf filled with preserving jars, and next to that was another shelf, stocked with more jars and a few bottles of vodka. The bed he was sitting on was old and creaky and hard, and the blanket covering his legs was warm, patched over, and clearly handmade. He ran his fingers over it, unsure that it was real, or what it meant.

There was a noise above him, and a square was pulled out of the ceiling. A trapdoor. Erik jumped to his feet, still fighting dizziness and pain, and Franz stuck his face through the hole. His dark hair, still loose against his scalp, fell in strands over his forehead, and his blue eyes were as calm and purposeful as they’d been the previous night. “You’re awake!” he exclaimed. Erik watched him warily. “How are you?”

“What is this place?”

“My friends’ house, in town. Don’t worry, no one knows this room exists. And they wouldn’t look for you here anyway. They think you’ve run off into the woods—I covered your tracks for you. It’s good you came when you did. He wasn’t really ready for you yet. May I come down?” As he spoke the last sentences, he was already lowering a thin wooden ladder through the opening, and climbing down.

Now that he was in his right mind, Erik could feel metal all over the place. His remaining knives were still strapped to his legs, even. “Why would you do that?”

Franz stepped off the ladder, and turned to face him. For the first time Erik noticed he had a bruise spreading across one cheekbone. He noticed Erik looking and said, “I got Olavi, my friend, to hit me, so it would look more realistic. They think I was taking you to my father when you attacked me and escaped. Now I’m using my popularity with the locals to help look for you.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything. Most of all, I don’t want you dead. Or worse.”

Erik was dizzy now. He shouldn’t have stood. “Why should you give a fuck?”

In answer to this question, he received the minutest of looks, which had the largest of impacts. It said, in a way that would’ve been spoiled if it was put into words, “Why shouldn’t I?” Franz gave him this, the most earth-shattering gift Erik had even been given, then asked, “Would you like some water? I doubt you’ll want to eat, you look awful. But if you want some food, Aina—that’s Olavi’s wife—has some for you. Then you’ll need to hide here for a while before we can sneak you away.”

“I was going to kill you,” Erik said, desperate without knowing why. “I was going to make you tell me where your father was sleeping, and then I was going to slit your throat.”

Franz looked at him again. He said, “Well, I suppose it’s good you didn’t. You couldn’t have gotten away without help. I’m going to get you some water. Just wait here, if you would.”

Erik shook his head and lunged forward on his rickety legs to grab Franz’s arm. “No. What is this? What are you doing? You’re not making any sense.”

Franz inhaled, exhaled, smiled. “Get some rest, Herr Lehnsherr. I’ll be back in a minute.” He patted Erik’s hand, which caused him to let go, then climbed the ladder. When he returned, Erik accepted the mug he was offered, still watchful, still shaking. Franz gave him another powerful look, then left him alone once again. “I’m going to close this up again, just to be sure. Knock if you need anything.”

For four days Erik hid, and learned little more about the man who saved him or his reasons for doing so. Of course there were forces which brought Franz to that moment, as much as there were for Erik; of course his good deed did not exist in a vacuum. But knowing that story would not have made a difference. The story would have made no more sense to him than its conclusion. They were made of the same unrecognizable molecules.

Three times, now, Erik had passed through a one-way gate, the kind that opened but once before shutting forever. The first was the day he arrived at Auschwitz, at thirteen years old. The second was the day he left it, at fifteen. Now, at twenty, he reached the third. He was young for this to have happened to him so many times, but that was the era in which he lived. Besides, although he didn’t know it yet, he was born for great things. This is the kind of contrivance destiny can easily arrange, when it finds itself in need of someone like him.

At Auschwitz, his reality was shattered by cruelty. In that cellar, it was shattered by kindness. He waited for days, for weeks, for the other shoe to drop, but it never did. When he was safely away, and all hope that this would turn out to be a trick vanished, he broke down. In a cheap hotel in Helsinki, he ran this bizarre happening over and over through his head until it finally hit him that it was real.

What Franz Bischof had done was inconceivable. Literally inconceivable. As a child, even in the cold and deprivation of the ghetto, there would’ve been no way for him to conjure up the camp, to believe that such a thing was possible. The only way he was able to do so once he got there was to abandon his old world entirely. This was the same for him now. He couldn’t comprehend it, but it felt dangerous to ignore it, and there was nothing he could do to stop thinking about it. The only move possible, therefore, was to step into yet another world, one capable of holding such a thing.

What was in this new world?

Humanity. Erik’s own.

Now, to reject the humanity of another, as Erik had both seen done and done himself, is monstrous, but still a basically animal thing to do. That kind of evil is born out of a type of ignorance, or blindness: an inability to see out of the cavern of one’s own mind, or even into it very far. Selfishness is a perpetual confinement to the self’s shallower waters. But to reject one’s own humanity—to come into full contact with it with opened eyes and an awakened heart, and then to push it aside—is more than evil. It is a cataclysm. It would be beyond Schmidt, but only because Schmidt could never reach the point where he’d have the opportunity.

If there is a hell, this would be how it was created. It would be the only way. A demon can’t spring from nothing, fully-formed; it must first fall from heaven, or at least from earth.

For most people, this self-contact is either sporadic and not dangerous, or else gradual, brought about in increments by small mercies, the pursuit of the spiritual, and the beauty of nature and of art. On some occasions, however, as on this one, it can be abrupt and absolute. It is those instances which can be so damning.

For rejection is a temptation, a terrible one. What did Erik see, now that he could see himself? He saw a murderer. What did he feel, now that he could feel out beyond the limitations rage and thirst for revenge had placed him in? He felt shame. Bone-deep disgrace, painful as cancer, for which the only cures were death—death of the spirit—or total acceptance. There was nothing easier than the first, and nothing harder than the second.

Killing Vesik, as an act out of context, might be considered excusable by a sober eye. It was a case not only of obvious but of delirious self-defense. What he did to the two SS men wasn’t even that—anyone who would blame an otherwise helpless thirteen-year-old for accidentally killing the people who held his mother still while his captor shot her in the head, mere moments after her death, would have to be rigid to the point of mercilessness. As for Bischof’s guards, at least one of whom may well have died: If nothing else his actions there were proportional to what they had intended to do to him had they gotten him down, even once his reasons for being there in the first place were accounted for. There was no punishment to fit those crimes, no law to suit them, no justice that he had somehow evaded, at least not in the world in which they’d been committed.

But justice isn’t goodness. It’s possible for a killing to be forgivable, just, even necessary; it isn’t possible for one to be good. Justice is external, adaptive to the moment, and based in reason. Goodness is internal, and eternal. It’s not the conscience, which can weaken, or be swayed by individual beliefs and emotions. It’s not a sensation of the mind, but rather a function of it. It is, as much as love, a psychological need. Both of which, in Erik’s case, were too little met, and had been for a long time.

In other words, what would save him in a court of law wouldn’t save him from himself.

He was more than an accidental killer. He’d been willing to kill long before Vesik. More than willing! The very idea of it kept him alive. He woke in the morning in the hope of it. Everything he’d done since leaving Auschwitz he’d done so that he could one day murder Klaus Schmidt.

Wasn’t it righteous, to murder the man who murdered his mother? Who had tortured him, a child, just to see what it would turn him into? Oh, god, and Erik could see that too. He was compelled to look at it. What was that, that happened to him? For so long he’d assumed he knew. But his knowledge of the events had grown in him precisely as they were warping him, and warped with him. Even as he was being crushed by the vastness of Auschwitz—not just Auschwitz, the whole campaign of genocide that would come to be called the Holocaust—even as he was surrounded by it, he couldn’t understand it. It was too huge. Just because one part of it happened to him, did that mean he knew anything about it? Just because he could feel that he was walking around with a wound in his soul, did he know how deep it went, or what it had punctured?

The truth was that in one sense _all_ of it had happened to him, simply by virtue of his being there while it went on. Schmidt wanted to destroy his empathy, but instead he only beat it into numbness. He didn’t stop Erik from absorbing the suffering of those around him. He couldn’t. All that pure human misery, and it simply went to live inside him. Untouchable for being incomprehensible, but no less real. The wound was not only what had been done to Erik individually, but what had been done to the whole human race.

And rather than reaching for balm or bandages, he reached for the bloody knife itself, the very one that had sliced him. He had experienced obscenity, and then devoted himself to its cause.

He could never feel that, not the whole of it. It was too much. It could be in his soul without ever reaching his nerves. But now a fraction of it leaked through.

Goodness is the understanding in each of us, however obscure, that what we do to others, we do to ourselves. That to hurt anyone, even in self-defense, even a torturer of children, is to damage our own living organism. Sometimes it’s necessary, but it’s never, never good. For the first time since Düsseldorf, this fact, wherever it resided within him, had a light shone on it.

So he met his humanity, was forced into it by Franz Bischof’s powerful kindness, and it was awful. It was agony. He had every reason to turn it down. No doubt there was much he could do without it; kill Schmidt, and every other living thing, too. He could become worse, even, than what Schmidt intended him to be. And no doubt, too, that to meet it head on, and let it become him, meant the complete destruction of everything he was, or might be.

But what could he do? He, who already had the seeds of greatness sown within him, who had fertile soil and hot sun to feed them, was now also washed with rain. In the end, it was chemical. What could he do but weep, now that he had tears with which to cry? What could the hard earth of his heart do but soften?

He chose humanity.

Thankfully, he was not made to go through all of this consciously. At the time, what happened seemed to follow no logic whatsoever. His worst memories fell on him in waves. He despaired, he panicked, he shook and wept. And when it was over, he was a different person.

Who that was, who could say?

The only hint was that the first thing this new person did was to dig the Reichsmark from his shoe, and throw it out the window.


End file.
